Debbie Gibson Is Not Just an '80s Throwback

"What if I peaked at 15?" Debbie Gibson asks in the Hallmark Channel movie Summer of Dreams. Okay, fine: It's not Gibson herself, but Gibson playing pop singer Debbie Taylor, winking at the parallels between the real star and the fictional one she plays on TV.

"Thankfully, I haven't had career lows like my character does in the movie, but there is always some basis in the truth," says Gibson, sitting in her publicist's car between radio interviews. "In the movie, you see me getting dropped from my label and I run out of money," she explains. "One of my favorite lines that I actually threw in is, 'I've been spending money I didn't know I didn't have.' Every entertainer has a business manager—you think that they got this and the supply of money will never stop, but nobody has an endless supply of money."

While Gibson, like everyone else, has to pay her bills, this movie is not just a money-making endeavor. Instead, she is a very enthusiastic participant in the heartwarming film, sounding giddy as she talks about Summer of Dreams. The movie's Debbie, having had her comeback dreams squashed, decamps to Ohio and steps in as a high-school music teacher—finding love along the way, of course.

Being hands-on is nothing new to Gibson. Unlike teenaged pop stars who simply perform the songs they are handed, Gibson wrote and produced many of her own songs. That includes her massive '80s hits, "Foolish Beat" and "Only in My Dreams," which she wrote and co-produced when she was all of 16 years old. (In Summer of Dreams she performs an updated version of "Only in My Dreams," as well as a new song, "Wonderland.")

When her follow-up album, Electric Youth, came out in 1989, Gibson became the first female artist to have a #1 album and single ("Lost in Your Eyes"). That was the same year she shared an ASCAP Songwriter of the Year award with none other than Bruce Springsteen. "I did!" she recalls, proudly. "I always considered myself to be a writer and musician first, before I was a vocalist. I always felt like singing was something I did to tell my stories."

While songwriting came easily, the subject matter of most of her songs was harder to come by. Because Gibson started writing music when she was 12 years old, she simply didn't have a lot of the life experiences that she sang about, like falling in or out of love. Luckily, she had family for that. "I had older sisters," she said, laughing. "I was observing their relationships. I wrote 'Foolish Beat," but I had never been in love once, let alone [could] sing 'I could never love again.' But I had sisters that were sobbing over boyfriends in my house."

Gibson's career had always been a family affair; her mother, Diane Gibson, was at her side for the bulk of her career. "She was the original momager," says Gibson. Diane oversaw Gibson's career over two decades, as she arced from teen pop sensation to starring in 17 Broadway musicals, including Les Misérables, Grease, and Beauty and the Beast. They have since parted ways ("Just on a business level," she explains), due to the changing business landscape and Gibson's diversifying career interests.

But her influence is still felt in unlikely ways—like when Katy Perry asked Gibson to star in her video for "Last Friday Night." "[Perry's] people called and said, 'You know, we hope this doesn't offend you, but would you want to play Katy's mother?'" Gibson says. "I was like, 'Yes, I have to do that!' And then I was channeling my mom in the '80s."

While Gibson is now happy to revisit her '80s stardom, she fought against her teen-star image for years. She eventually posed for Playboy in her mid-thirties as a means of shaking off the last vestiges of her squeaky-clean image. "I think that young female artists from the beginning of time have had this hard time transitioning from girl to woman," Gibson says of having been famous early on, "because there's so much emphasis placed on how awesome they are, and then they want to be allowed to transition [to adulthood] naturally...Like Miley [Cyrus], you know? It's our problem that we keep her in this bubble from her Disney days. It's not her problem, she's just being herself," she says. "There's too much fear surrounding girls projecting a bold image."

So when she decided to shed her inhibitions and (most of) her clothes in Playboy, Gibson found the experience empowering. "There was a moment where I was like, Oh, I've actually been out of this prison for quite some time, so why not do this in a big iconic kind of way? And, to me, Playboy is so iconic," she says. "The music business and record executives actually make you feel like a prostitute...Hugh Hefner made me feel like a class act. He is a businessman. He's respectful."

The music business and record executives actually make you feel like a prostitute...Hugh Hefner made me feel like a class act

Still, going from teen stardom to adult womanhood took Gibson a while. "I was generally a late bloomer and I was not comfortable with my sexuality," she says of that period of her life. "The whole idea of girls growing up with this idea that using your sexuality is a bad thing—I think that's a bad message. You should embrace all of who you are and all of what you have."

Now, Gibson is her own business manager and has plenty of ideas—and she doesn't really care whether people think they're corny. Neither poking fun at herself or aiming full-tilt at nostalgia are off-limits; she teamed up with fellow '80s star Tiffany in the kitsch 2011 movie Mega Python vs. Gatoroid, and she is unabashedly thrilled to be making movies with Hallmark. "You can't be in this business for 30 years and have an ego," she says. "There are going to be glamorous moments, unglamorous moments, there are going to be times where you feel appreciated and other times where you don't—and you have to find your own center line and your own sense of self-worth or you don't belong in this business."

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